Today's Stichomancy for Michael Moore

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought
the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely.
The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and
hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times.
And then - go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time,
like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad."

But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of
unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would
she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she
stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a
coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor

and hinting at all the numerous possibilities suggested
by such matter as had come to hand since. Even fear
of old Jonas Prim and his millions had not been enough
to entirely squelch the newspaper instinct of the Trib-
une's editor. Never before had he had such an oppor-
tunity and he made the best of it, even repeating the
vague surmises which had linked the name of Abigail
to the murder of Reginald Paynter.

Jonas Prim was too busy and too worried to pay any
attention to the Tribune or its editor. He already had
the best operative that the best detective agency in the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot:

for his own behoof; and yet there was a distinction between the two
acts which made him feel that the one was so much more blackening
than the other as to be intolerable to him.

"I don't pretend to be a good fellow," he said to himself; "but
I'm not a scoundrel--at least, I'll stop short somewhere. I'll
bear the consequences of what I _have_ done sooner than make believe
I've done what I never would have done. I'd never have spent the
money for my own pleasure--I was tortured into it."

Through the remainder of this day Godfrey, with only occasional
fluctuations, kept his will bent in the direction of a complete
avowal to his father, and he withheld the story of Wildfire's loss

take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the
ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman
should, just as you went to school and college, because it was
the thing to do. It's better to leave the blustering and
tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne
Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is!
It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he
thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the
one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other
thingswe're extraordinary, we're clever, we could be said, I